anomura: Robots.txt & Crawl Policy Reference

AI Summary: anomura is a search and indexing crawler operated by Direqt. It is designed to discover and index pages on their customers' websites to power search and chat experiences.

Role and policy boundary

Anomura acts as a targeted search indexer. Direqt uses this crawler to ingest content from websites so that their AI chat and search interfaces can provide accurate, site-specific answers.

If you are a customer of Direqt or participate in their ecosystem, you should allow this bot so your content can be indexed. However, if you do not use their services and wish to prevent third-party bots from scraping your content, you should block it.

A robots rule is a declaration of intent; it does not replace authentication, authorization, or rate limiting. Start with a dedicated group:

User-agent: anomura
Allow: /
Disallow: /staging/
Disallow: /internal/

To stop access for the entire site, use:

User-agent: anomura
Disallow: /

Avoid assuming that User-agent: * expresses the same business intent. A wildcard can affect assistant and training crawlers too, and it makes later audits harder because the source of the decision is less specific.

Layered verification

Verify the same URL through each control plane instead of assuming that one green signal represents the whole request path. Compare the bot-specific robots group, the page-level metadata, and the response headers captured at the public edge.

Anomura is expected to respect standard robots.txt directives. Adding a specific Disallow rule for the anomura User-Agent is the recommended first step to opt out of their data collection.

The Policy Engine evaluates the selected user-agent, path scope, and the other supplied layers independently. It can therefore explain why a bot is allowed while another is blocked, rather than returning one blended website score.

Page-level directives can still override the intended outcome for indexing:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

If a response uses these tags, the report marks the result as blocked or conflicting even if the crawler-specific robots group is permissive. This is especially important for canonical pages served through an edge cache where headers may differ from the origin response.

WAF and Nginx remediation examples

If you are not a Direqt customer and want to enforce a strict block at the network layer to conserve server resources, you can use a WAF rule:

{
  "description": "Block Direqt Anomura crawler",
  "expression": "lower(http.user_agent) contains \"anomura\"",
  "action": "block"
}

Use your platform's actual middleware response pattern rather than copying this simplified example without review. Never place a secret, verification token, or internal policy identifier in a public header.

map $http_user_agent $block_anomura_private {
    default 0;
    ~*anomura 1;
}

server {
    location ~ ^/(admin|account|private|licensed|internal|api)/ {
        if ($block_anomura_private) { return 403; }
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

Review checklist

Use this checklist after every policy change and after a CDN or WAF migration. Record the request URL, User-Agent, HTTP status, final redirect, and the exact evidence used to reach the decision.

Verify that the dedicated group appears before relying on a wildcard, test a representative public and private path, and compare live response headers with robots.txt. Keep the policy close to the content owner's intent and record whether the site wants discovery, citation, or no access at all.

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